


Personal Notes (12) Who are you?

by longhairshortfuse



Series: Carlos's Secret Diary [12]
Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Confusion, Gen, Suspicions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 14:57:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1692488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longhairshortfuse/pseuds/longhairshortfuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos is caught in the sandstorm and meets his double. They talk science (well duh!) but there are differences between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Personal Notes (12) Who are you?

I hardly know where to begin, this has been such a strange day. At the beginning, I suppose.

I decided to do some fieldwork out in the sand wastes for a change. I have not felt much like company lately and volunteering to go out and look for mutant _soricidae_ in the traps Ell and Gio set a few days ago gave me an excellent excuse to pack a day's supplies into the old Range Rover and disappear before it got hot. 

I drove to the furthest set of traps first, a mile off the road that leads to the next little town. None of us ever bothered to visit it, I expect it is just like Night Vale with low-rise buildings and wide, dry, dusty streets, but maybe a little less weirdness. I checked the traps, logged the contents before letting the non-mutant wildlife scuttle away. The more interesting specimens went into the clear plastic tanks we purchased from the pet store. I re-set the traps to give myself a valid, scientific reason to spend tomorrow on my own too then drove back in the direction of Night Vale, diverting off at the next GPS location stored in the satnav. There must have been a glitch because the next location it gave me was in totally the opposite direction, towards Desert Bluffs. 

As I stepped out of the car at the correct location the radio turned on. I heard Cecil's disembodied voice in the desert, "The future is changing, but it's hard to tell." I turned it off, and for once it stayed off. I couldn't bear to hear, I wanted to disconnect completely, wanted no company at all, not even the voice in my head. The wind was getting stronger and I looked around to see if there were clouds causing the sunlight to dim. Behind me, back in the direction of Desert Bluffs, I saw a wall of dust towering up into the sky. It obliterated everything in a grey and yellow haze. I estimated that with the wind speed around fifty miles per hour and a distance of maybe two miles I had less than two and a half minutes to check the traps and get back in the car to wait out the storm. 

As a precaution, I put on the emergency goggles I kept in my heavy-duty lab-coat and the dust-mask Ell had given me along with the keys to the Range Rover. I found the traps quickly but they were empty. The edge of the sandstorm reached me as I turned to walk back to the car. It was pitch dark within a minute and I stumbled and fell, grazing my hand. The sand felt rough as it blasted against exposed skin, invigorating then painful. I picked up a handful, shared it between both hands, feeling its unusual texture. 

I have no explanation for what happened next. I closed my eyes and the sand felt... yellow and bright, and made me think of the harsh sunlight that was so absent. I stood up and got into the car. Then I had the sensation of deja-vu as I stood up all over again and got into the car. 

I wasn't alone.

I had got into the passenger side of the car and checked the air vents were closed. I reached over to the driver's side to close the vents which I knew to be open. A hand gripped my wrist and pushed me back. The hand belonged to a man sitting in the driver seat, barely visible in the darkness, who appeared to be wearing goggles and a mask. He removed the mask and said, "Who the hell are you?"  
I took my mask and goggles off with my free hand. "This is my car, you can shelter here if you need to but you could be more civil. Are you lost? Did you park nearby?"  
He let go of my wrist and removed his goggles. It made little difference, there wasn't enough light to see and the interior lights were off.  
"I'm not sure who I am," the stranger confessed. "Or how I got here." His voice seemed both familiar and strange. I knew I had heard it recently but couldn't place it at all.  
"My name is Carlos," I said, "I am a scientist."  
"Carlos, yes, scientist," he echoed. "Desert shrews."  
How did he know that? I remembered the voicemails on Cecil's phone. I reached up to turn on the interior light. 

We stared.

The man who stared back looked like I do only in photographs rather than in the shaving mirror. He wore my shirt, my lab-coat, my uncontrollable hair full of sand, my frown.  
"This is something we should study." In unison.

We discussed possibilities for what had happened. He was as knowledgeable as I am about my old time manipulation work and we excluded the possibility that I had got it to function macroscopically and sent myself here. It never worked like that. It was okay for sending single particles forward in time by a few seconds, quite reliable actually, but the energy and computational demands of sending a complex object like a human forward in time by almost two years and to a different location were beyond my resources. Could he be from the future, sent back for some reason? Again we discussed and discounted this theory. He looked exactly like me. We had the same old scars, the same new graze from minutes ago when I tripped.

We agreed that we couldn't both be Carlos and since he had to be reminded of that name he said he would find another. He wanted to use my middle name but I refused. We agreed that the best thing to do was wait out the sandstorm then go back to the lab and get Ell to do some biometric analysis on us both and maybe start a DNA test. 

"So," he asked, drawing out the single syllable as the sunlight fought to penetrate the dying storm, "Cecil?"  
"Shut up." He grinned at me and started the car. I turned on the radio. It started from exactly the point where I had turned it off earlier.

Back at the lab we caused a fuss. Ell immediately went into a state the postgrads called "full-on science bitch," (although never to her face) ordering them all around, poking and prodding first one of us then the other, looking for differences. She examined and photographed almost every inch of us both before setting up the biometric data analysis equipment to look at our iris and retina patterns, fingerprints, electrocardiogram, electroencephalogram, and last she took cell samples for a detailed comparison of our DNA, the sort that would take weeks to complete. 

There were some differences between us. Our eyes were not exactly the same colour. Mine are deep brown, his had a lighter, golden tone behind his irises. We appear to have slight differences in personality. He seemed more at ease, more confident, perhaps a little more like I wish I could be. We have different preferences. Listening to the radio show, which was even odder than usual today and it was hard to focus on it with my double's incessant chattering, he said Cecil had a boring voice and that bright, breezy Kevin was a better announcer. He might have been winding me up, but it made sense to me that my double would prefer Cecil's double and I could do without the competition. Yes, he seems more mischievous too, he made a lewd joke with Ell that would have been very out of character for me. Unusually, Ell laughed it off instead of giving her usual cold response to unwanted sex comments.

After Ell finished with us, she declared us both healthy, wrote "NfNV" on my medical notes and sent me up to my apartment. Our lab in-joke: Normal for Night Vale. She said she'd find a place for my nameless double because we'd be more productive, we'd get twice as much science done if there were two of us. I watched them drive off in the Range Rover to ask our sponsors to fund an unexpected extra employee. I realised that I didn't like him much and hoped they'd say no.

I had a shower, put on clean clothes and went back down to the lab. I went into Ell's office, surprised to find it unlocked as she kept our accounts and cash float. There was a file open on her desktop machine. I looked, read the logo, it seemed familiar. Not something I had ever actually seen, maybe something I had heard. It read, "Look around you. Look inside you." The rest disappeared off the bottom of the screen. I knew better than to pry into Ell's computer, it automatically took a picture whenever the keyboard or mouse was touched. I left the room and closed the door behind me. I listened to the paranoid inner voice that told me I had seen something but should say nothing, change my passwords and move my lab notes to a new hiding place.

 

_They said yes, Carlos, a scientist with all your knowledge, but a slightly more relaxed moral stance? They said yes, please. He could have replaced you perfectly if it wasn't for the fact that you hid your notebooks again after the bifurcation. The doubles phenomenon fascinates me, I still don't know how I became this part of Ell. I remember that there was a slightly different Ell before me, one who liked cuddles and fluffy bunnies and was so painfully outspoken and loyal. Your Ell kept you as far from real harm as she could. I don't know what I was before, if I even existed. She, we, were caressed by the very end of the storm sent to Night Vale. I can feel your Ell as part of me, inside my head, sometimes in the driving seat or talking reason from the passenger side if I'm tired, but back then I was new born, full of energy and loving every fresh sensation. There can be other small differences between doubles. On the way to Desert Bluffs we pulled over and acted on that lewd comment from before, just so that I would know what sensation your Ell had never wanted and never missed._


End file.
